TV review

"Preacher"

Series premiere 10 p.m. Sunday on AMC

Behold, AMC noticed some of us are bored as hell of “The Walking Dead” — forever walking, always more of the dead — and tried its hand at an entirely new comics adaptation. And hallelujah — it is good.

“Preacher,” from the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, kicks off with a sequence straight out of a campy old sci-fi flick: A mysterious pulsating mass careens through space, coming to rest in the body of an African minister evangelizing to his flock. The alien visitation doesn’t, shall we say, take.

Soon, we’re in the sweltering Texas hamlet of Annville, where laconic preacher Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is delivering an uninspiring sermon to his uninspired congregation. Cooper, our weary antihero, carries himself as if his white clerical collar weighs roughly eight tons as he makes the rounds, halfheartedly ministering to his parishioners (many of whom might, with apologies to Woody Allen, roughly be broken down into “the horrible and the miserable”).

The juxtaposition of these two scenes sets the show’s tone, which stays faithful to its pulpy, violent source material while grounding itself in a Western vibe. It approaches the camp of early “True Blood” seasons while kicking up the southwestern dust of “Breaking Bad” (on which showrunner Sam Catlin was a writer and producer).

The pilot is a mixed bag, packing in both too much and not quite enough in its eagerness to introduce all its key players and get us to Jesse’s transformation. Still, those other characters are raucous fun: Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), a hard-drinking Irish vampire on the run, and Jesse’s ex, Tulip (Ruth Negga), a scrappy mercenary who aims to lure the preacher back to his less godly former lifestyle.

The toughest screen transition has to be Arseface: Played by Ian Colletti, he’s the son of the town’s redneck sheriff (W. Earl Brown), whose botched shotgun suicide deformed half of his face into an implausible shrunken hole. Colletti’s prosthetics render him more human-looking than his comics counterpart, but he’s still a haunting sight.

The weak of stomach need not stick around for this one; “Preacher” doesn’t skimp on the gore, either, which speaks to executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s allegiance to the comics.

Big themes open up more in the three episodes that follow. Jesse, infused with the nebulous alien power, begins to see his profession as more mission than purgatory. He’s got no shortage of sinners on hand, including wife-beating Confederate re-enactor Donnie (Derek Wilson) and Jackie Earle Haley as the odious Odin Quincannon, owner of the local slaughterhouse. He’s also dogged by two peculiar, unkillable suits (Tom Brooke and Anatol Yusef) bent on reclaiming his new superpowers. Plus: Something hilariously awful happens to Tom Cruise.

Whether “Preacher” can grab and hold a large audience like “The Walking Dead” remains to be seen, but its first few episodes hold out hope there’s life beyond zombies.